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Parse Table Composition

Separate Compilation and Binary Extensibility of Grammars

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Book cover Software Language Engineering (SLE 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 5452))

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Abstract

Module systems, separate compilation, deployment of binary components, and dynamic linking have enjoyed wide acceptance in programming languages and systems. In contrast, the syntax of languages is usually defined in a non-modular way, cannot be compiled separately, cannot easily be combined with the syntax of other languages, and cannot be deployed as a component for later composition. Grammar formalisms that do support modules use whole program compilation.

Current extensible compilers focus on source-level extensibility, which requires users to compile the compiler with a specific configuration of extensions. A compound parser needs to be generated for every combination of extensions. The generation of parse tables is expensive, which is a particular problem when the composition configuration is not fixed to enable users to choose language extensions.

In this paper we introduce an algorithm for parse table composition to support separate compilation of grammars to parse table components. Parse table components can be composed (linked) efficiently at runtime, i.e. just before parsing. While the worst-case time complexity of parse table composition is exponential (like the complexity of parse table generation itself), for realistic language combination scenarios involving grammars for real languages, our parse table composition algorithm is an order of magnitude faster than computation of the parse table for the combined grammars.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Oregon, USA

    Martin Bravenboer

  2. Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

    Eelco Visser

Authors
  1. Martin Bravenboer
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  2. Eelco Visser
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing and Information Systems, Athabasca University, 1 University Drive, AB T9S 3A3, Athabasca, Canada

    Dragan Gašević

  2. Fachbereich 4, Institut für Informatik, Universität Koblenz-Landau, Universitätsstraße 1, B127, 56070, Koblenz, Germany

    Ralf Lämmel

  3. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota, MN 55455, Minneapolis, USA

    Eric Van Wyk

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Bravenboer, M., Visser, E. (2009). Parse Table Composition. In: Gašević, D., Lämmel, R., Van Wyk, E. (eds) Software Language Engineering. SLE 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5452. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00434-6_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00434-6_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-00433-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-00434-6

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